Newfront Delivers Personalized Leave Services for Clients Facing Growing, Distributed Workforces with AbsenceSoft
Newfront is one of the fastest-growing retail insurance brokerages in the United States. In 2021, they added full leave administration to their suite of services. Since then, the program has been successfully managed by Marina Galatro, Executive HR Consultant and Emily Zellmann, Leave of Absence Consultant.
When they first launched leave administration, Galatro and Zellman worked hard to create processes that would ensure great experiences for their clients’ employees. However, they were having to do everything manually, using a combination of spreadsheets and Microsoft Outlook calendar reminders.
“Instead of our clients doing everything in a spreadsheet, I was doing everything in a spreadsheet for the client,” recalled Marina Galatro, Executive HR Consultant.
As a third-party administrator of leave, the majority of Newfront’s clients are based in California, which was the very first state to offer its own paid family leave law in 2014. Compliantly managing leave with just the complexity of that one state’s law kept Galatro and Zellman very busy. But in 2021, the rise of remote work made the need for a dedicated leave system critical.
“A lot of our clients have had a hypergrowth of attracting and hiring individuals outside of their headquartered state or office location,” said Galatro. “So as a result of companies moving into other states, these companies had a need for someone like Newfront to outsource their leave administration.”
Many companies today are taking advantage of remote and hybrid work to increase their talent pools and fill in-demand roles. However, every time an employee from a new state joins an organization’s workforce, it adds more complexity to leave management – especially if they reside in one of the growing number of states that offer their own paid family leave.
Eventually, Galatro decided to actively look for a solution to make sure she could keep delivering the highest quality services for her clients. When she started vetting solutions, she struggled to find a solution that could support her specific needs as a third-party administrator (TPA). After a long and thorough search, Galatro found AbsenceSoft.
“We needed a solution we could utilize for multiple clients, where they can see their own dashboard and not information from other companies,” said Galatro. “AbsenceSoft was the only solution able to meet our needs.”
Today, Galatro leverages AbsenceSoft’s flexible solution to deliver a personalized leave experience for each of her client’s employees. Being able to customize documents, attachments, and other communications is essential for her leave management processes. Galatro continues to make ongoing adjustments and changes to the system as their service model and processes have evolved.
Galatro really appreciated AbsenceSoft’s CLMS-certified support team when they first implemented the platform.
Since then, AbsenceSoft has empowered Galatro and Zellmann to onboard new clients on their own, and faster than ever before. They can leverage AbsenceSoft’s powerful automation and workflows specifically built for third party administrators to get new clients up and running fast.
“We are able to onboard clients in just a week, which gives us a competitive edge,” said Galatro. “Others in our space can take up to 5-6 weeks to get a new client up and running.”
Looking to the future, Galatro is planning to continue to modernize her leave administration services for her clients. Soon, her clients’ employees will be able to submit leave requests through an online portal, powered by AbsenceSoft’s Employee Self-Service feature. The leave portal will provide a mobile-friendly way for employees to submit a leave request to Newfront’s team whenever it is most convenient, check on the status of the request any time, and upload documents quickly and easily.
